Five Year Anniversary

Venue

15.15-16.00 – Presentation: What went wrong with the IT-industry by James “Cope” Coplien

We are celebrating our fifth anniversary together with a flashback of when it all started. You will get personal stories from five different persons that was with us from the very beginning:

Ester Daniel Ytterbrink

Martin Stenlund

Kathy Compton

Michael Tiberg

A special guest speaker we have invited James “Cope” Coplien that gave the very first talk at our Lean Opening event.We had a lean start of Foo Café already in March 11, 2012 and to celebrate our fifth anniversary we are honoured to have Cope as a guest speaker. Listen to Cope’s experience and his view on the IT-industry and we are sure that you will able to bring new insights with you back home.

Cope will talk about “What went wrong with the IT-industry”

We like to point to software as the bad boy of professional disciplines — we build the wrong things, deliver late, and run up unbelievable costs. And we’ve been at this for 50 years. What’s wrong with us? Yet software delivers late half as much as construction projects do. For any project longer than 10 days software people are almost infinitely more accurate than the weatherman. We won’t talk about airline on-time departure performance. And, in terms of forecasting to within a week’s accuracy, pregnancy prediction is even worse.

If development responds to continuous market feedback it is very difficult to deliver the wrong thing, and it’s hard to miss expectations about the timing. We do know how to do this right. And some groups are succeeding. We find excuses among those who fail, from whom the analyses are frequently of the nature, “They didn’t get the right requirements up front” as though requirements are a thing you gather up front. Or: “they didn’t deliver what was promised” as though one knows at the outset what one needs. The whole industry — both vendors and consumers — share a perspective that demonstrate a frustratingly high level of ignorance about how complex systems work.

Are modern development approaches the solution? The success stories range from Toyota to Google. But saying that one uses a modern framework doesn’t help. There is a frightening gap between the ideals behind modern frameworks and the way they are interpreted in current broad practice, or by the standards for certification, or by the education systems that tool people for development. Those willing to make a quantum leap in learning can eradicate the problems, but it begs a radically new way of doing business and of managing development. Even the most agile companies have not come to grips with how much more old ways of thinking they must leave behind. The problems are no different than those that plague construction, airlines, and the weatherman.

Speaker:

James "Cope" Coplien has extensive experience in this field he has been active as a developer, coach, tutor and mentor in many companies. He has written more than ten books on different subjects from C++ to Architecture and he is still involved in creating a new language to make things right.